


i'll see you in my dreams

by corleones



Category: Historical RPF, The Jazz Age
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-01
Updated: 2014-01-01
Packaged: 2018-01-07 01:00:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,261
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1113624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/corleones/pseuds/corleones
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Kids break their necks trying out stunts like you did, riding atop taxi cabs with a bottle of champagne in their hands. You're little gods, wherever you go - New York or Paris or Rome."</p><p>Vaguely sticks to historical events (though it jumps back and forth in time a bit) with references to the literature around them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i'll see you in my dreams

The midnight train from Paris to Antibes has you asleep on Scott's shoulder. He's reading a manuscript, something that awful Ernest shoved into his hands at the platform. It's a sleeper train, which means you have a little bunk above you and in the dark, you are tempted to wind your fingers through those soft hairs at the back of your husband's neck and lead him to bed but he hates to be interrupted while he's reading so you pretend to be asleep just there, hoping the soft perfume at your throat will distract him instead. After another ten minutes, your bones are stiff so you yawn elaborately and swing a leg over his for the purposes of both comfort and seduction. It is a thrill to feel him laugh against you, to hear the rustling of paper as he puts his book away and turns to you, saying alright and then mmm Zelda as he kisses you. 

Behind you there is the moon, smudged against your back as you lean into the glass, Scott over you. You glow in the slow burn of him, the adoration that still gets you crazy. 

 

Do you ever think about it? Of course you do. You think all the time, somedays more than others. Some days you don't even want to open your mouth. You never know when something you say off hand will end up in one of his books. It's not that you're afraid - how are you gonna be afraid of? Maybe Scottie will read his books and hate you, but you guess she might hate you anyway. Everyone else seems to think its charming, not just Rosalind and Gloria but you. They think you're charming and they want to dress like you, they want to cut their hair and wear pearls and follow the two of you around like ghosts. Kids break their necks trying out stunts like you did, riding atop taxi cabs with a bottle of champagne in their hands. The magazines think its funny. You make little quips about the pages in your diary ending up in his books and oh, how they laugh. The tongue-in-cheek plagiarism. You're a golden muse. You're little gods, wherever you go - New York or Paris or Rome.

No, it's not fear that stops your tongue. Only lately you've been feeling like maybe you'll disappear, like all of you is dissolving into paper. You want to warn Scott that if he keeps filling up his books with you, there might be nothing left in a year or two. Just hollowed out Zelda Sayre, with a glass of gin in one hand, nothing left but the glass and the pearls and the dresses dresses dresses. 

 

Paris is your favourite. You will never love another moment in time as much as your first time there. Everything bright and sparkling, god - you think New York couldn't hold a candle to this. Those parties, with their bathtub gin and speakeasies dull in comparison to this new life. New York was the beginning of the world as you knew it. Here, you dance in a room and the men go wild. Every body seems to be doing something, something big and grand and you never seem to meet any boring people, nobody concerned with money or taxes or how to do anything but live. It seems to you the Seine is lit up on people's brilliance and they've laid paths along it just for you and Scott to dance through. Still, its never the same after that. After the first flush, things begin to recede. 

You move to the the Riviera a few months in and this, it is boring. Scott works all day and all night. You hear his typewriter, furious and impatient, even when you are miles from the house. You dive into the bright blue water and even down there, your ears carry the sound like a ghost. In your eyelids, you can see him there with his whiskey and his books, the telegrams flying up and down the country. He never shows you anything anymore, says he's got editors for that now. You're just a girl after all, a flapper doll. 

The pilot lights your cigarettes and he mixes your drinks and doesn't look a damn thing like Scott. When he kisses you, he puts his hands on either side of your head, covering your ears, trapping the noise and when you fuck, all you can hear is the hum of him. Its the first time you've felt like yourself in years. 

Telling Scott isn't like you thought it would be. You'd expected to feel good about it, to feel kind of powerful and big but its more like setting fire to house full of hay. He locks you up in the house for weeks until you agree to forget it ever happened and during those days, the coast beckoning from your window, that curve of ocean that you and your pilot had danced in, it all seems impossibly distant and you, you begin to feel very small.

 

Its different when Scott strays. You can't put him anywhere, even if you wanted to. He's a hurricane of bad decisions. There are days where you can barely connect him from the words he puts on a page, the delicate sting of his words compared to the brute at your breakfast table. 

You tell him he's losing you but you've lost him instead so you take up dancing, take up writing, take up painting. Everybody think its a phase, each new trick just a way to catch his attention again or to fill the time till he comes back but truth be told, the impulse was in you from the start.

You wrote stories before you met him even and maybe if they knew that, it would change something but it doesn't matter. Your love isn't something you drink, like a gin martini, that you taste and never want anything again. You're not Daisy Buchanan. 

In the sanatorium, you read reviews of Tender is The Night in the bathtub. Incidentally, the bits they like best were yours to begin with. 

 

Later, you will claim you knew. How could you not? You who know him better than anybody. That very first time you met him, you must have known how it would go. How deeply entwined your lives would become, that you would be closer than any two people have the right to be, closer than it is maybe sensible. That you would live like one person until the thought of seeing each other became unbearable and that he, your husband, Francis Scott Fitzgerald would be a writer to set the whole country on fire. You knew. You always knew. The first time, you saw him, that golden boy. He was always going to be yours and always, he was going to be great.

King and queen of the jazz age. 

(You remember his tie was a little crooked, that he smiled like he knew where he was going. He said something a little silly, something you can never completely remember or even completely forget. He said he was going to know you a long time, Zelda Sayre. He said he liked how the night smelled on you, or maybe that was later. Either way, that part you liked. A few weeks later you kissed him, a quick little thing pressed between you. You don't remember it especially well - there were such a lot of boys back then.

Truth is, he could have been anybody back then.)


End file.
